RPost Year-in-Review 2017

The RPost team thanks you, our community of users, customers, partners, shareholders, and advocates, for another exciting year at RPost. Your support enables the RPost team to continue innovating for our customers, and to maintain RPost as a worldwide leader in cyber security, compliance, and productivity solutions.

Each year, we find it useful to reflect on our company’s mission and discuss the steps RPost is taking to further that mission for its customers and stakeholders.

As we head into the new year 2018, our mission continues to be to help people worldwide communicate and transact business electronically in the most secure, compliant, and productive ways possible. This year, based on customer feedback and market trends we discuss below, RPost was especially focused on the “secure” (cybersecurity) aspect of our mission. We believe cybersecurity plays a critical role in every service RPost offers, whether tracking, proving delivery, eSigning, authenticating content, or sharing large files.

With RPost products now bundled into or built into email platforms, business management platforms and distribution networks that report to serve hundreds of millions of business users worldwide, we believe overall success centers more than ever on continuously enhancing the customer experience — all product experiences, from the perspective of senders, receivers, user training, and admin reporting. For RPost, optimizing the experience of the entire product eco-system is a priority – which is why we have invested so heavily in major product updates and innovations.

Let’s review what our teams have been focused on:

1. Centralizing Administration Online; One-Log-In Across Platforms.

Early in 2017 we announced the new RPortal, the “new” RMail, and wide acceptance of our all-in-one eSign platform, RSign. We have connected these products together with RPortal becoming our central management console for all RPost products, settings, user administration and report generation. With one user log-in, users can transition from RMail running inside their email program, to RShare secure file sharing, to RSign, advanced eSignature services. We encourage all of our customers worldwide to upgrade to benefit from these enhancements. (Contact an account manager for upgrade assistance)

2. All-in-One Plus Specialization.

RPost pioneered the concept of “all-in-one” in the context of all of the email and digital transformation essentials that make business better. Main products RMail and RSign provide world-class “all-in-one” offerings for cybersecurity, encryption, tracking, proving, file sharing, and eSigning; essentials that make Microsoft Office 365, Outlook, Gmail, Zimbra and generally email, better for business. These products have been recognized by leading analysts, Gartner Inc. and Forrester Research Inc. year over year as leading products in the encryption and eSignature categories. While most of our customers gravitate towards these anchor products, we never lose sight of the need to provide specialization. This focus keeps RPost products top rated whether sought as an all-in-one offering, or bought for a specific purpose. RPost packages these specialized offerings as RForms, RShare, and Registered Email services, for example.

3. Cybersecurity will continue to be mission critical to business continuity and compliance for the foreseeable future.

• • Within cybersecurity’s broad spectrum of tactics and applications, RPost is specifically focused on information privacy, authentication, and digital risk monitoring:
  • Information Privacy: In early 2017, RPost’s major upgrade added an even simpler email encryption function; RMail’s “automatic” encryption mode for effortless email privacy compliance. RMail also added a toggle to switch, on a message per message basis, to “RPX executive” mode encryption for those in need of end-to-end privacy to protect strategic secrets. This becomes important, for example, for those that want to ensure a level of privacy even when the message they are sending resides inside the recipient’s inbox (Read about Risks – Paradise Papers). Additionally, RPost released a new “compliance filter” feature in partnership Alt-N that includes additional security features to empower customers to add automated email filtering rules along with anti-virus, anti-spam, anti-phishing and other threat prevention services.
  • Digital Risk Monitoring: Internet criminals have cost businesses more than $3B in financial losses in what the FBI calls “business email compromise” (BEC) attacks. RMail’s new “Anti-Whaling” digital risk monitoring technology protects against BEC attacks by alerting users of possible BEC-related activity. This feature was the catalyst for more than 20 technology resellers to begin a deployment of RMail to 40,000 users across thousands of companies.
  • Authentication remains a core component of RPost technologies, both in managing user access to transmitted information and in verifying “who said (or sent) what when,” electronically. We have seen a recent trend in the need to both authenticate timestamp and content of email delivery, combined with encryption. This combination has proven a perfect fit for delivery of mission critical notifications in the health care, real estate, and payroll management outsourcing industries, among others. Business applications and enterprise customers have contracted with RPost to build-in RPost’s encrypted Registered Email service, so that millions of messages may be sent automated, for specific types of regulated or required notifications. In the United States and in Europe, this combination has proven uniquely suited to serve as authentication-ready audit proof of data privacy compliance associated with HIPAA and GLB regulations (USA) and GDPR regulations (Europe).

4. eSignature services go beyond simply recording recipient signoff, electronically, and offer ample ways to streamline and automate business processes.

For those looking to use standard eSignature services built into their email program, RMail includes these out-of-the-box. For those that view eSignatures as an opportunity to streamline a business process to boost productivity and customer satisfaction, RPost’s RSign is a newer full service web-based eSign platform that provides more opportunities to easily add controls to signoff process; and RForms makes it simple to add a controlled eSign experience to any PDF form creation application or standard form, without any need for use of APIs, programming, or online document preparation. Together, these eSignature platforms that are designed for power users, offer all of the specialized features one might need, such as sequential signing, field rules, shared templates, form rules, embedded logic and dependencies, and more. Banks and insurance companies such as Chase and Erie Insurance certified these as satisfying legal and compliance demands, and have identified them among the leading services available today, as has Gartner Inc., a leading technology analyst, in their 2017 eSignature market guide.

5. A natively integrated set of services drive higher user satisfaction than multiple standalone services cobbled together.

• • Whether in Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Online (Microsoft Office 365 Online, Hotmail), Gmail, and now Zimbra, RMail embeds all your sending features for security, compliance, and productivity into your existing email user interface. There’s no need to cobble together a bunch of disparate services.
  • RPost has partnered with more than half of the leading independent email software platforms and has agreements signed to embed RMail into these products for their millions of end users. Integrated partners enjoy the opportunity to add all the important sending features their users require, with one simple implementation. RPost has developed automated processes to make upgrading from free to business plans seamless for hosted email providers that add RMail as native functions to their platforms.

6. Customer retention is king for the software-as-a-service business model.

• • RPost retention rates for small business customers are in the 90% range, and large business customer retention in the 97% range. These high retention rates show that, RPost’s customer success teams have effectively employed new tools like the Net Promoter Score system (NPS), automated user training and follow up calls based on usage levels, to ensure RPost customers are getting the most out of their RPost services.

7. Distributors and resellers embrace software-as-a-service products, enduring smaller per-order revenue, to create an ever-growing, recurring high margin revenue stream.

• • Working with Ingram Micro, the world’s largest technology distributor, Microsoft, and others, RPost has completed an intensive project to build automation into its distributor/reseller management processes, with programs that integrate RPost user provisioning, billing, reporting, and service plan upgrades into third party systems and web tools via APIs.
  • RPost has implemented these capabilities in multiple languages, and RPost services can now be sold by thousands of resellers around the world with automated back-office functionality. With this successful partnership, Ingram Micro has scheduled to bring the combination of RPost products to its marketplaces worldwide starting by expanding its presence in the US market, and then deploying for the rest of North America, Europe, and certain countries in Asia-Pacific.

8. International System Operations.

• • To accommodate interests in Europe and other countries, RPost added an operations hub in Frankfurt, Germany with eIDAS certification in mind, and language localization in English, German, French, Dutch, Danish, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, with others to come.

9. Technology providers who practice “continuous innovation” will thrive.

• • Every RPost service is continually being improved, with new feature enhancements, infrastructure improvements, and 3rd party integrations. For example, RMail received significant recent updates, adding important cybersecurity and productivity feature enhancements, as did RSign, RForms, and reporting and analytics systems associated with the Registered Email service. RPost has tied all of its products together with centralized management and reporting, accessible in the continuously updated RPortal.
  • RPost’s customer success team is always soliciting customer feedback (look out for our annual survey in the coming weeks) to understand how changing technologies and evolving business needs might influence how people use (or want to use) RPost services. The RPost team considers this feedback to drive planning in all critical areas of our business, including product development, customer success, and business development.

What’s Next?

For customers:

• • Customers who haven’t made the jump to the newly improved RMail, get in touch with your account manager (or contact us) to get started. Remember, this update not only improves the overall user experience, but adds new critical cybersecurity features.
  • RPortal, RPost’s unified self-service customer portal, is now available. RPortal empowers customers to add and remove users, change service plans, adjust company-wide settings, create unique reports with a variety of filters, and schedule reports data to be delivered in a variety of formats daily, weekly, monthly or on demand. Get in touch with your account manager (or contact us) to get started.
  • RSign, RPost’s web-based eSignature service, is here to help streamline and automate your business transactions with advanced capabilities including templates, dependencies, automated signoff logic, and more. Contact your account manager (or contact us) to request a demo or trial. View RSign in action.
  • RPost is expanding its customer success team and adding new tools, training resources, and educational content. RPost is making it easier for customer IT and operations staff to automate end user education within their companies.
  • Product development roadmap highlights (Stay tuned to the RPost blog for more information.):
    • RPost has added a simple way to toggle from its automatic email encryption to a version that forces the email to remain encrypted inside the recipient’s inbox – protecting from data analyzing email providers (such as Google) and ensuring privacy as the email transfers across the recipient’s hosted email environment (such as Office 365 hosted exchange), through the recipient’s IT department an inside the recipient archives (protecting from Panama Papers-type risks). You will find the added privacy this feature provides comforting when transmitting YOUR OWN personal financial, health, or strategic data.
    • RPost has added a policy-based “compliance filter” feature, to automatically reduce the risk of non-compliance.
    • RPost and its partners have added integrations into many of the software platforms RPost customers use on a daily basis, including Zimbra, which reports 500 million users worldwide.
    • RPost is working on extending RMail’s SideNote® private note feature to include additional productivity tools for work groups, and its encryption feature to enhance secure collaboration.

For partners, investors, and the RPost team:

• • RPost consistently enjoys analyst coverage and industry accolades from respected organizations such as Gartner Inc., Forrester Research Inc., and RESPRO^® – the largest integrated residential real estate organization. The RPost team will continue to work with industry experts, analysts, and customers to deliver best-in-class solutions.
  • RPost has expanded major distribution agreements to be global, with Ingram Micro, world’s largest technology wholesaler bundling RMail alongside Microsoft Office 365 email, and Synacor, world’s largest business email platform outside of Microsoft, with an aim to make its RMail for Zimbra extension part of a security upgrade for its millions of business email users that operate on this leading platform.
  • RPost will continue to build its technologies deeply into established work flows for regulated industries such as insurance, legal, finance, health care, real estate, and others. RPost has exciting integrations that are expected to enable service, automated for many large corporations across the US and Europe, expanding on some of RPost’s recent customer wins among the largest worldwide oil and gas, pharmaceutical, and insurance companies.
  • RPost will continue to emphasize technology thought leadership, extending its 200,000 weekly business readership of Tech Essentials and contributing meaningful insights to discussions around emerging or dynamic technologies.
  • RPost has been selected to be the platform supporting e-communications among a multi-country specialized distributor based in Switzerland, and we expect this close partnership to support compliance with new European regulations GDPR and eIDAS that map to RPost’s core Registered Email technology, to create a surge in demand for RPost services across Europe.
  • More software platforms are choosing to integrate elements of RPost technologies into their products, encouraging their business users to secure and streamline their work flows.

Thank You

The RPost team appreciates the opportunity to continue serving the thousands of corporate customers and more than 25 million users that have relied on RPost services over the last decade. While it is useful to reflect on our team’s advancements and progress over the past year, our strategy continues to be guided by our goal to position and maintain every RPost service as the top choice for new and existing users worldwide. To this end, we trust you will be excited to see what the RPost team delivers in 2018.

On behalf of the team, I wish the entire RPost community a safe and successful year ahead.

– Zafar Khan, CEO of RPost

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